


this world makes us hollow (but it still lets us hope for better)

by olivemartini



Series: All The Lovely Ones Have Scars [31]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Iron Man 1, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Pepper's trying to help, Tony's making it difficult, between Iron Man 1 and Iron Man 2, pre-realationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 01:31:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15697407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olivemartini/pseuds/olivemartini
Summary: She's in her office when Tony calls for her and runs out to find him soaking wet and hyperventilating, the final proof of the truth she had been avoiding all along- Tony did not leave that cave as the same man he had been when he went into it.  Maybe he left something behind, or maybe morphed into something new entirely, but the fact was that neither of them could pretend that Tony was as fine as he keeps insisting he feels.(Pepper thinks Stane had told her that, once, the same day he died, which really pisses her off.  She's started to refuse to believe that he knew anything about Tony at all, like if she closed her eyes and wished really hard she could make the sting of his betrayal go away, if only for Tony's sake.)





	this world makes us hollow (but it still lets us hope for better)

She is in her office when she hears Tony call for her.

( _T_ _hough that's not the right word for it.  Pepper's trying to be more descriptive of those sorts of things, just for her own recollections, but there's really no way for her to describe it, other than the fact that it was more of a sound than a word, a garbled version of her name, guttural, like it had come straight from the stomach.  It was the kind of sound that, if it's made by a child, would have sent mothers running before it even hit the air in full.  Pepper had never imagined that that sort of thing would ever find it's way out of the mouth of a man like Tony Stark.)_

"Tony?"  That always seems to be her line, now.  Tony disappearing and her always trying to find him.  Tony running away and Pepper racing after him even though she never gets to catch up.  Tony leaving and Pepper not knowing, so she stands on the top of the steps and calls down into the darkness and just hears the echo of her own voice, reminding her of how separate the two of them really have become, even though it still feels like they are part of the same twisted, screwed up body.  "Tony, where are you?"

He doesn't answer.  It seems that even that one sound had exhausted his efforts and now he's leaving her to play hide and go seek.  If this were a few months ago, Pepper would have left him to his own devices, turned it into a lesson about accountability and how it isn't her job to search for him and never even bothered to ask if he was okay, but now she is learning not to always end her sentences in an exclamation point.  Sometimes it's better to assume that you don't always know what is going on.  God knows how many things she could have fixed before they became a problem, had she only figured that out sooner.  

It takes her a full three minutes to find him.  Three minutes of flipping light switches on and off in every room of the house and calling his name into empty hallways, until JARVIS finally takes pity on her and directs her into the bedroom.  Even then, she doesn't find him until she notices the light shining out from under the bathroom door.

When Pepper walks in, rapping on the door and closing her eyes to pretend at some semblance of propriety between them, she slips on the puddle of water and has to grab onto the side of the bathtub to haul herself back to her feet.

Tony's on the floor, crammed between the shower door and the toilet.  His sweatpants are soaked through from the water splashed all over the floor and his shirt was abandoned on the ground beside him, like he had tried to get dressed and gave up halfway through.  He's also not breathing.

At least, not the right way.

He's breathing, but the air doesn't stick.  Tony's taking in shallow gasps, over and over, and his hands are clawing at the rug that had gotten bunched up at his side.  He keeps doing it like it is the only thing that might keep him grounded, and when that doesn't work, he switches to his hair, burying his fingers up to the knuckles and yanking on it so hard he doesn't rip it out at the roots.

"Tony."  They had protocols for this.  He had mentioned that this happens sometimes, in a voice too casual for her to miss how much having to admit to it bothered him, that he had been having problems.  That he couldn't sleep, and when he did sleep he saw things, dreamed terrible dreams that were more like memories because he recognized all the faces.   _Sometimes I have freak outs,_ he said, without her having any idea of what that meant, and then stuck a printed out list onto her desk and left the room, leaving her to read through the most insufficient guide to dealing with PTSD that Pepper had ever seen in her life.  Not, admittedly, that she had much occasion to read those types of things before now.  "What's wrong?"  She knelt on the ground beside him and water sloshes over her knees, scalding hot.  "Are you hurt?"

He doesn't look at her until she makes him.  It breaks protocol, and doesn't respect the boundaries they worked so hard to create, but she had walked in on this type of thing too many times to rule out the idea that he was trying to hide that he was sick, or hurt, or had drunk himself into such a stupor that he doesn't even know her name, only the fact that she would be disappointed in him if she knew the truth.

Really, when she sees what he was really trying to hide, Pepper almost wishes that he was drunk.   

Tony's crying.  The ugly kind of crying, the one you want to do alone but makes you want to be held at the same time, where your stomach turns in on itself with the effort and your shoulders shudder and there is not enough time between sobs to draw in a breath, his face smeared with an awful mix of tears and snot and that scalding hot water.  

Pepper wants to make it better.  She wants to ask questions.  But sometimes there's nothing for you to do but wait.

( _It takes a whole fifteen minutes.  Fifteen long, terrible minutes, where he cries and she pretends not to know, where he hiccups his way through the end of the sobs and is not able to meet her eyes, where they finally reach the end and he looks like he had just ran a marathon, or been battered around by a tidal wave without knowing how to swim.   Fifteen minutes while she thinks that maybe, just maybe, Stane was right when he told her that Tony didn't come out of that cave the same man he was when he went in, and that stings, because she had made it her personal mission to have everything Stane said about Tony to be wrong._ )

"Sorry."  Tony says, taking in one last shuddering breath and wiping his face off on that soaked-through shirt.  He still won't look at her.  "I shouldn't- sorry."

"Don't be stupid."  Hadn't she begged for him to let her help?  Promised him that she would not leave, no matter how certain he was that she would want to?  Doesn't he remember that she said that he was her everything, too?  But if all that were true, and it was, why had she been caught off guard by this?  "Does this... I mean, do you do this a lot?"

Her words are clumsy.  They make him pull away, in some invisible fashion that Pepper can more sense than see.

"I did try to warn you."  He turns to her and offers up a wavering smile and she hates that, the fact that he is still trying to be strong for her.  

"You didn't say anything about this.  How long?"  She waits for an answer and reconsiders, because that wasn't exactly the right question.  "How often?"

"Not often.  Not like this.  I can control it."  After being so quiet about his thoughts on Stane and the kidnapping, it seemed like he was finally going to tell her the truth.  "But sometimes things catch me off guard."

These were panic attacks.  This was PTSD from Stane, and maybe the cave, and everything he's done with that suit since he built it.  This was the product of building your life on war when you were made for something softer.  

"But the shower?"  It's the wrong question.  That's all she has now, the wrong words and half felt reactions, so scared of being hurt that she no longer knows how to help.  "God, Tony, what  _happened_ to you?"

Later, she would try to come up with reasons for what she did.  For why she asked.  But really, beneath it all, was that she wanted to know.  She was selfish, and wanted every part of him to belong to her, and did not want to think that there was something about him that she didn't know.  So even though he told no one else, even though he had refused to tell her before, she still asked him when she should have been scrambling to find any way to make this pain inside him go away.

Before, though, she had not found him crying on the bathroom floor.  

Pepper supposes that he figured it couldn't get any worse.

"Everything,"  Tony said, and the word rang hollow.  He is gripping at the rug again, ripping out the threads in navy blue clumps that drift through the water.  "In a place like that, you learn what its like to die."  He keeps pulling out the thread and Pepper reaches out to hold him still.  His fingers jerk under her hand but they stop, eventually.  "Or at least, you start to know what it's like to want to."

She had wanted to know so badly, and this time, with the two of them sitting in the spreading puddle of lukewarm water, Tony tells her.  About being asked a question and giving an answer they did not want, defiance tastes like freedom even when it feels like an executioner's hands on your neck.  About how it took two men to hold him under the water, not because he was strong ( _he had not eaten in forty eight hours and had just gone through the most invasive heart surgery imaginable_ ), but because that was just the lengths that a body would go to, the failsafe to every self destruct button.  That they held him under longer than he would have thought he would have been able to stand, how during the worst times, he heard her voice when he wanted to hear his mother's.

About a car battery dripping oil over his hands.  About playing chess in the darkness.  About Yinsen, giving his life for Tony's, bleeding out in his metallic, gun powder filled hands and making him promise not to waste it. 

 _Don't waste it,_ Tony repeats, staring into the water like it is a one way mirror into the scene he was describing, and if Pepper looks hard enough, she can almost see it to.   _Don't waste your life._

In the endTonywas right, just like always.

She hadn't wanted to know.

"See?"  Tony sounds angry.  Angry at her, at himself, at the world.  "I knew you'd look at me differently.  I'm still me, Pepper."

 _But you're not,_ she thinks, and almost says it before she catches herself.   _But that's not always a bad thing.  It doesn't mean you're weak.  It just means you've grown too big for the man you used to be.  That's not a bad thing.  This Tony is good, too._

"I know you are."

"I don't want you to look at me like I'm broken.  I told you that before, I think."  They have turned so they are facing each other, her knee pressing against the side of his thigh, her hand still keeping his still against the carpet.  During his story, his hand had shifted so they are palm to palm, like they are each other's only lifelines.  "I like the way you look at me."

She should be standing up.  She should be making him get back in the shower, even if she has to stand by the counter and talk to him the whole damn time, give him something to tie him down when the panic threatens to sweep him away.  He should make himself a pot of coffee or a mug of hot coco, and she should start mopping up all this water.

And yet.

"How do I look at you?"  Her voice is just a whisper.  They are so close that they do not need to worry about being heard.  "Tony."  She tugs on his hand.  "How?"

_Like you're something holy.  Like heaven spit you out at my feet all bruised and bloody and I can't find a way to make you whole again.  Like I can't believe you're here, like you aren't real, as if you're just a mirage that would fall apart if I ever tried to touch you.  Like you're something more than you are, like you need absolution and blame at the same time and I'm the only one I can give it to you, like I'm trying to soak in the sight of you in case you decide to leave me behind once and for all.  Because you are going to leave me behind one day, Tony.  You won't even be able to stop it._

_Destiny isn't something that you can run from, and I knew from the moment I met you that you were made for something bigger than this._

"Like I'm something good."  They are still holding hands.  That's become important to her, somehow.  More real than anything else that has been happening between them.  "Something worth believing in."

"If there's anything in this world I've still got faith in, it's you,"  She says, even though it's sort of a lie.  There's plenty of things in this life worth trusting in.  Everything has the power to disappoint, and yet there's a bit of power to it, surrendering yourself over to the belief that this world is filled with more good than bad.  Pepper's just waiting to be proved right.  "I think I've told you that before."

"But I'm not that same person."  He stares down at his hands and its only then that she notices his knuckles are bloody.  She wonders how long Tony tried to fight his way back to the surface on his own before he finally broke down and called for her.  "It made me something new."

"Maybe this is who you always were."  Her hand is on his chest, palm over the reactor.  It makes her skin go see through.  "Maybe you just needed a push."

"I think it broke me."

"I think it rebuilt you."  She moves to her knees, and then stands, offering a hand down to him.  Tony just stares at it.  "There's a difference, Tony."

"Not to me."

Pepper stares at him for a moment, making a mental note to make an appointment with a therapist the next morning.  Someone good, someone they could trust.  Someone who understood that the continuation of wealthy clients was worth more than the money magazines would pay them for the inside scoop on Tony Stark's couch confessions.  He could go, or he could ignore it.  At least she knew she tried to help him and didn't turn away just because she was afraid of trying.

They're both learning how to be better.

 __Sometimes, that just has to be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on Instagram @olive.writes.fanfic


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